If you look closely, you’ll see a monkey and a squirrel. It was hard to find an image without naked avatars.

At GetSocial, we’re tracking 30+ social networks and messaging apps, and we thought that providing an update on how people share and access content would be good to understand a couple of trends.

Here’s our infographic (with commentary):

Top Channels Stable

The trifecta of social channels is untouched since last year: Pure Dark Social generates the most shares, Facebook provides the most traffic and everything else pales in comparison.

Referrals per Share Dropping

As more and more content gets added to social networks, each share is seen by fewer people and drives less traffic. Here we can see two kinds of social channels: the “broadcast” type, which includes Facebook, Twitter, etc., and the “personal” type, such as WhatsApp, Email, and SMS. A lot of social networks, including LinkedIn and Pinterest, generate more shares than traffic, which suggests that it is harder to convince someone to click a link on those channels.

Social Buttons phasing out

Only a small percentage of shares is done through social buttons. All the rest is done by using the share function of your mobile browser or by copy-pasting the URL on desktop.

Mobile is King and Queen

Mobile drives most shares and traffic, which correlates perfectly with the steady increase of internet access on mobile devices.

“Sharing users” Matter

Visitors who share not only generate more free traffic for websites, they also are much more engaged and loyal than the average.

João is the CEO at Getsocial.io, a social media tool that helps websites track their social sharing activities. By knowing who’s sharing their content they’re able to understand which users, items or social networks are driving more traffic and conversions to their websites.… View full profile ›